


masked vigilantism for beginners

by arbitrarily



Category: Rebel Belle Series - Rachel Hawkins
Genre: Alternate Universe - Superheroes/Superpowers, Canon-Typical Violence, Enemies to Friends to Lovers, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-19
Updated: 2015-12-19
Packaged: 2018-05-02 18:57:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,946
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5259974
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/arbitrarily/pseuds/arbitrarily
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It’s every superhero origin story that doesn’t involve aliens or murdered parents: accidents happen, and then it’s kinda sorta up to you to defend mankind against the forces of evil. </p><p>And if you’re lucky? You might just score yourself a worthy sidekick.</p>
            </blockquote>





	masked vigilantism for beginners

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Squishy_TRex](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Squishy_TRex/gifts).



> I hope you enjoy and I hope you have a wonderful holiday!

 

 

 

The first thing she had said to him was: “It’s not what you think.” 

The second thing she said was: “It’s not as bad as it looks. Honest.”

And the third thing she (thought she) said was: “ … ouch.”

 

 

 

 

 

Okay, so, the thing worth knowing here, and the thing she’d explain if she had both the words and the oxygen in her lungs for it: Harper never set out to become a vigilante. Okay, _masked_ vigilante. A masked vigilante with super strength and other super awesome side effects, all great power and great responsibility, blah, blah, blah. Harper’s led a pretty peaceful existence, or as peaceful an existence a teenage girl can ever know, and revenge has never been a thing to beat in her heart (unless, mind you, her heart is beating to the drum of the honor roll or student government elections or cheerleading semifinals, but none of that is in the name of vengeance but rather competition).

What happened was she fell down a well. Hand to God, like an episode of _Lassie_ , she fell down a well. One minutes she was taking a short-cut through the wooded lot that abuts her neighborhood, and the next rotting wood she hadn’t even seen underfoot was giving way and she fell. Down a well. A _well_. Like where people throw wished-upon pennies or where trolls live (do trolls live in wells? she’s not sure where she got that impression, but it stuck, so much so that mid-plummet into a mostly-dry well she had thought, _[uncharacteristic expletive], I really hope there’s not a troll down there_ ). What she found at the bottom of that well was a swollen kneecap, a minor bump on her head, a sore hip, and a whole lot of stinking dark green sludge. It came up to her knees and didn’t so much as break her fall but make her gag. It had burned a little, though not unpleasantly; kinda like a full-body face mask, actually.

And then, she had scaled the gross, slimy walls of that well because that suddenly, totally, was a thing she could do now. Awesome.

That’s not the only thing she can do. She can run through walls ( … which she learned the hard way, meaning “accidentally;” the school board wound up explaining away the collapsed wall in the girls locker room as a “structural anomaly,” which come to think of it, is a pretty good phrase to describe her body post-unsolicited-makeover)! She can lift things no human being should be able to lift! Like cars! And probably Wile E. Coyote anvils if they had any of those around! She can totally kick butt!

Which kinda sorta brings her to now: in the ruined men’s restroom at Al’s Pizza Shoppe with five dudes sprawled out on the ground (unconscious, not dead; she’s not, like, _Kill Bill_ -ing it or anything), a broken urinal, a shattered porcelain sink, a busted pipe spraying like a fire hydrant, and about an ankle’s depth worth of dirty water.

Oh, and David Stark, a.k.a. the closest thing to a non-super villain nemesis a superhero like her could have. David Stark, standing there, looking at her all awestruck and also like he might vomit.

“[actual expletive],” is the fourth thing she says to him.

 

 

 

 

 

 

To be fair, she’s only in this bathroom because of him. Wait, rephrase. To be fair, this all happened because of him.

Harper had only stopped by Al’s Pizza Shoppe because she had wanted a slice of pepperoni with banana peppers and ranch dressing on the side (okay, maybe two slices) (high-octane super-powered crime fighting makes you _hungry_ ) when she recognized the guys hanging out at the back table. Local ne’er do-wells with probable ties to the fledgling Mobile syndicate (can you believe it? the entire seventeen-odd years of her life and she had no idea the mob had made it to her hometown in all its neo-moonshine glory; she has been learning _so much_ ). She knew them the same way she knew a lot of unsavory folks about town: a prior run-in, this time at a local auto body shop. Took an age for the welts the chain one of them had hit her with, wrapped around her upper arm, to fade. She had to wear long sleeves an entire week, careful to hide the bruising and the reddened chain-link shaped indents from her mother. She’s come to hide a lot of things from her mother – daughter sneaks out window wearing a mask to fight local crime: could be worse things, right? – but that’s not the point here. The point is: they weren’t looking at her as she waited at the counter. Nope, they had eyes only for David freakin’ Stark. And David Stark? Apparently only had eyes for them, too. She didn’t get it, until she totally did: she followed the trail of deductive reasoning that included overheard and largely ignored school paper gossip and the rapid-fire way David's fingers were moving across his phone's screen. David Stark was going to try and earn whatever the high school equivalent of the Pulitzer by writing about these guys.

So dumb. So, so dumb.

Even dumber?

David Stark wasn’t even smart enough to make tracks for the back exit. No sir. Instead he ducked into the men’s restroom – and they followed. Now, it was entirely possible that a) all these dudes simultaneously had full bladders and were in dire need of the facilities or something scientifically and anatomically improbable, or b) there were some men's room shenanigans of the super dirty and filthy she’d rather never ever have to consider about to go down, or c) these guys really took Pine Grove Academy journalism as seriously as David Stark hoped he’d be taken seriously – and they were totally going to kill him. Or silence him. Or whatever these guys did. 

So Harper did what she did – she intervened.

“Well, this doesn’t look like the ladies room, huh? Or … does it?” And okay, so whatever was at the bottom of that well hadn’t provided her with a never-ending reserve of pithy pre-butt-kicking one-liners. She’s a work-in-progress. But the five guys had turned around, assessed her with faces ranging from mild confusion to full-on overdramatic disgust, and behind them David Stark quite literally had his back against the wall. 

So Harper did what she did best – she fought back.

In addition to antagonistic repartee, Harper didn’t inherit any actual skill or finesse when it comes to fighting. Instead, she fights like an animal, all instinct and unleashed power, no grace to it, just Harper throwing her body literally straight at and in the face of danger. It’s bizarre, but she kinda gets what people mean when they sing the praises of, like, hot-room yoga or whatever because fighting like this? Unleashed and unhinged and powerful in a way she had no idea existed – it’s kinda super zen. It’s kinda super zen until it isn’t, until the aches and the pains and the aftermath all begin to set in. 

The aftermath in this case being: her cover’s super blown.

 

 

 

 

 

The local papers, David’s beloved glorified newsletter included, had picked her up as a story. They documented any and all sightings of what they referred to as “the masked vigilante seen around town.” The most offensive part of it all was how they assumed the masked vigilante in question was a guy. Come on. The second most offensive was that they hadn't even named her. Come on: the sequel.

“Like I said – looks worse than it is,” she says, but her voice has gone all nervous and high-pitched.

David has that nightmare horrified look on his face. 

“What?” he asks, finally looking at her instead of the bathroom carnage. And oh right, she gets it: he’s not bugging out because she’s got blood streaming down the side of her face or, yup, that’s a table knife she’s got sticking out of her side, but because she kinda sorta definitely just majorly kicked five WWE-sized dudes’ butts. She cringes as she pulls the dull knife out of her (again: _ouch_ ), because, yeah, that’s another side effect of Whatever It Was That Happened To Her: she’s basically indestructible. Sure, she gets banged up and she still bleeds and bruises and her bones can break, but her body repairs the damage, like, crazy super fast. (Harper kinda wonders if she unlocked some awesome immortality thing or whatever but she’s kinda too terrified to ever test that because, you know, if she’s wrong, then, well, she’s dead, and she’s pretty sure (though, this too remains untested) she’s not gifted with the power of resurrection). 

David’s watching her for sure now, and he’s all pale and green and still looks like he might boot. Great.

Harper regrets pulling the knife out because now her side hurts like crazy. And sure, her body’s going to knit itself up, but it takes a little time. She sways on her feet and David’s eyes bug out that much more, and she manages to say, “Okay, this might not be great,” and then, “You mind grabbing a girl a breadstick before you help her home?” before her knees give out beneath her.

 

 

 

 

 

Here’s another thing Harper can add to the long list of things she hides from her mother: a boy in her bathroom.

That sounds way dirtier than it is.

Considering the boy in question is David Stark queasily dabbing at her wounds with iodine and she’s only wearing her bra (the super old, washed-a-million times, used to be white but is now gray one with the crooked bow hanging by a single thread between her breasts), “weirder” might be a threshold impossible to vault in this circumstance.

She’s waiting for the interrogation to start, but it never comes. David’s uncharacteristically quiet (well, uncharacteristic in the sense that the David Stark she’s known since infancy never missed the opportunity to try and knock her down a peg or two, except for maybe back when he didn’t yet possess the power of the spoken word), but maybe she scared that temptation straight out of him. Maybe that’s another superpower she’s got: she can make boys, or at least this boy, go speechless.

“You’re taking this all rather well,” she says, whisper-quiet and just shy of goading.

He reels back from her. “Dude. What _are_ you?”

 

 

 

 

 

Harper Price always wanted to be someone important.

Like her Aunt Jewel always says: be careful what you wish for – you might just get it.

Or her Aunt Martha: mankind makes plans – God laughs.

Or her Aunt May: never eat cheese before bed – nightmares will arise. Not that that has to do with much of anything, but it’s advice all the same.

 

 

 

 

 

"Oh," she says, too nonchalant to be read as such and she knows it. "I'm just someone trying to help."

David doesn't look like he buys it, but he doesn't say anything. Maybe that's why she tells him. The truth. Everything. He listens, his face stuck in the same frown she's seen him where in their AP calculus class, like she's just as inscrutable and impossible as, like, asymptotes or Riemann sums.  

He's still quiet, and that makes her nervous. He goes back to the makeshift first aid kit he has scattered in the bowl of the sink. She looks away from him when he returns his hands to her. It's o ddly intimate to have a boy’s hands on you, even if it is like this. Even if the boy in question looks equal parts horrified and fascinated each time he touches you. 

“What those guys want with you anyway?” she asks. Play dumb, she learned that from a great many _Law and Order_ interrogations she’s witnessed via her couch.

“If I knew, don’t you think I’d have done a better job avoiding them?”

“I hardly think there’s any logic to follow in that, save for what you might call obfuscation.”

A smile tries at his mouth but he bites down on it. “Look at that. Street fighting and still finds time for SAT vocab.”

“I made flashcards,” she says, dry as her mouth feels.

He leans his weight back on his heels and looks her dead in the eye. “I guess I just don't get ... why. Why do this? It's like you’ve got some kind of Good Samaritan thing happening here – on steroids.” 

She looks at him in surprise. Of all the questions. “Why wouldn’t I?” She shrugs and winces. “I can, so why not.” He’s still looking at her like she’s even crazier than frankly she thinks this situation warrants, so she sighs heavily and rolls her eyes, neither gesture matching the earnestness of her voice when she says: “I love this place. This is my home. And if I have the … abilities to protect it, keep it safe … ” She trails off. She looks him dead in the eye. “How do you say no to that?”

“Does Ryan know?” David asks her.

Harper looks down at the floor at the spilled box of band-aids. She broke up with Ryan, like, a week ago. It had been super diplomatic, in a way that Harper had no idea teenage breakups could ever be, and she still isn’t sure if she should feel insulted. She guesses she can settle on relieved, because, well, it was never going to work, not when she couldn’t bring herself to tell him the truth. Harper had no idea until recently how heavy secrets can weigh. How that weight brings you down, colors not just each and every conversation but how you feel about the person you’re lying to. How she felt about Ryan. 

She raises her gaze back up to David. She’s told so many lies to so many people; it’s a relief to be honest with someone. Anyone. Even him. But even this carte blanche moment of openness and honesty has it limits: she’s not going to tell him any of that. 

Instead, Harper rolls her eyes. “Sure. I told him after our upside-down _Spiderman_ kiss in the rain.”

David shoots her that pointed, impatient look she’s always thought he leaves reserved specifically for her. This time though the look is tempered, as if he means to say, “Hey, none of that guff, I just cleaned up a lot of your blood.” Which, okay. Fair enough. 

"Can you fly?" he asks, his face scrunched up.

Harper cocks her head. "I can fall from great heights with minimal consequences?"

A smile threatens his mouth. He stands, and moves to leave.

“Hey," she calls softly to him. "Thanks.” David simply nods at her. “Oh, and by the way? You write about this in your little school paper? You saw me drop those guys at Al’s. I’ll drop you faster.”

David’s hand is still primed on the bathroom doorknob but he doesn’t turn it. She watches fear, surprise, and something darker (something kinda like that same awe from earlier, like he’s impressed) skitter across his face. 

What a weirdo.

 

 

 

 

 

That’s how it starts: he kinda becomes her sidekick. Unsolicited, and mostly against her will.  

At first, Harper keeps tabs on him because it’s totally within the realm of possibility that David goes full-tilt whistleblower and takes to the paper and rats out her great big secret to the school. And then, like, CNN would pick it up or the NSA if they keep an eye out on school papers, seeking out buzzwords like SUPERHUMAN STRENGTH or MASKED VIGILANTE.

He never does write about her. Instead, he starts seeking her out, full of police blotter tips and leads for stories more salacious than debate club intrigue or mystery cafeteria meat.

“You don’t have to keep stumbling into trouble,” he tells her, his body leaning against the locker next to hers. Harper glances past him to make sure no one notices him talking to her; that’s all she needs. “You can seek it out.”

“That might be the worst advice I’ve ever heard,” she says, slamming her locker shut a little too hard. The metal indents and David leaps back, eyes wide. 

“You ever think about getting a cape?” he asks, racing to catch up with her.

“I take it back. That? That’s the worst advice I’ve ever heard.”

He brings up the cape again when she emerges relatively unscathed from a Fiery Disaster at the Fireworks Warehouse. “For the last time: no. I’m pretty sure that would create a hazardous work environment.”

David quirks an eyebrow, tips his head towards her skinned up shoulder and where her elbow has poked through the now singed hole in her shirt. She shrugs.

“We’re on a sliding scale of hazards here, Robin.”

“Please,” he calls to her as she walks away. “Like you’re Batman.”

“I gotta call my sidekick something,” she shouts back over her shoulder.

Yeah. He kinda becomes her sidekick. He even gets one of those police scanners and they start using that to ferret out intrigue at the Winn-Dixie and the Women’s Garden Club. 

“Are there others?” he asks her one evening, after she defeats some Shady Dealings at the Golf & Country Club. The sun’s spilling dark red across the sky as it sets and she squints as she looks at him. “Like you?”

Harper frowns. Truth be told, she had never considered it. 

 

 

 

 

 

There are others. 

David’s one of them.

 

 

 

 

 

People like to say that everything happens for a reason, like not only are they trying to rob the world of its terrifying chaotic ambivalence towards meaning or whatever but trying to rob themselves of responsibility. Everything happens for a reason! It’s out of my hands!

So, that said: everything clearly happens for a reason because David Stark’s got his own super-heroic-maybe-probably-sort-of-Harry-Potter-chosen-one backstory, and honestly? Eff him. That’s so unfair. She gets open wells (which, by the way, the city should really check that out. Put a manhole cover over that, Lord only knows how many mutated superheroes are barreling through solid brick in this town) and he gets _destiny_.

Because, plot twist: David Stark can see the [warranted expletive] future.

 

 

 

 

 

She learns the truth only because he saves her life. 

They’re in the junkyard, of all places, the only sound a lone dog barking from somewhere beyond the chainlink fence. They stand there together in the silence, until – well, _until –_

David knocks her to the ground. 

“What the – ” she yelps and she goes down heavy, her elbow striking the pavement as David’s weight bears down on her. Like he’s trying to protect her. It’d be kinda, well not cute (she doesn’t want to use the word _cute_ where David Stark is concerned), but something in the neighborhood of cute if it wasn’t so stupid. 

And then, just as she is gathering her verbal arsenal to assault him, a giant piece of sheet metal falls from the mountain of wreckage that had stood before them. 

"How did you – " and of all the things she expected, what she didn't expect was for David to look so sheepish.

He knew it was going to happen before it did. It turns out there’s a long list of things David Stark could take credit for prophesying (like the Pine Grove lacrosse bus driving into that ditch en route to the semifinals or the potato salad at the Community Center's Fourth of July party giving everyone food poisoning or the Miss Alabama embezzlement scandal or Hurricane Ivan).

The sight he has is hazy and difficult to control. He admits that part sheepishly too, like there's shame to be found in not being able to predict the future crystal clear. “It’s not like I have a remote and can just change the channel,” he says.

"You could learn," she says haughtily and he rolls his eyes. "Hey. Did you know I was going to say that?"

 

 

 

 

 

They’re back to business as usual after that, trying to find ways to use David’s skills. He's like a super vague tuning fork: he can pick up vibrations and odd images, every now and again able to shape them into actual information they can use. For the most part, it's just hippie-dippie bad vibes or unfocused photos of the future that live in his head. 

For the most part, it’s all small town stuff, until it isn’t. Until there’s an actual total super villain to face down. 

Until Harper’s up against someone (some _thing_ ) that might actually not only match but outpace her abilities.

It turns out there are others, and it turns out there are more than just David and Harper.

It turns out the Mobile syndicate isn’t _quite_ what she thought it was and is in fact a cover for something far worse and far more nefarious and far more intent on not only taking her out, but David too. And that strikes her as just plain unfair. She didn’t sign up to play the part of bodyguard. Technically, she didn’t sign up for any of this. _Technically_ , post-fall down open well, she hadn’t even known what she got herself into. Sure, there’d been that initial shock after she clambered her way up out of there, the even bigger shock when she realized that nothing was broken and nothing in the last fifteen minutes was irreparable. She was fine. The twinge in her hips and the throbbing in her knee had faded by the time she arrived home; she didn’t even notice until midway through a scalding shower – nothing hurt. Harper’s always been funny with panic, funny when there’s Something Huge to worry about. She stresses and she she makes lists and she drives herself just about to the point of distraction with biology exams and _Great Gatsby_ essays and whether the treasury has the budget to allow for a spring formal or if they’re gonna need another bake sale and if they do, god help her if Mary Beth brings those lemon squares of hers – but the big things? She goes quiet and calm. So she decided to ignore it. She ignored it, but she couldn’t sleep, felt wired. She accidentally pulled her closet door off its hinges. “Guess I don’t know my own strength,” she had joked. It all led to her stopping after school to get gas. She didn’t mean to do any of this, but she stopped for gas and she stepped right into a robbery in progress, all in the name of a strawberry-lemonade Super Freeze. And there it was: that split second of decision – she had thought about it, and then she committed herself to it. You could say it was all downhill from there. She made her choice. She learned her strength that way, baptism by fire. She had glanced up, Robber #1 on his back, the stacked heel of her knee-high boots square in the center of his chest, that dazed expression on his face looking up at her (Robber #2 sprawled out unconscious in front of the freezer), and she had spotted the surveillance camera. She snatched a pair of oversized aviator sunglasses with reflective blue lens off the rack by the register, pulled on a truly disgusting camo-print beanie, threw a nondescript baseball cap on top and scurried out of there, a harried, “Call the police! You’ll be fine!” shouted over her shoulder at the clerk. And then she drove away. And then, well. 

She had made her decision. She started fighting crime.

This is her home. And hell or high water – she's gonna defend it.

 

 

 

 

 

Harper meets her match on the roof of the school; David didn't see her coming. 

The girl is small and young, maybe Harper’s age. And she wants David. 

“Where are my manners?” the girl says, mouth spread in a barbed smile. Harper braces herself. “The name’s Blythe.” Harper doesn’t say anything, and Blythe steps closer. “And I know who you are, Harper Price.”

Harper doesn’t even see it coming, the girl’s so fast. She launches herself at Harper and Harper goes down, hard. She gasps. She’s never fought anyone like, well, herself. Blythe’s kick lands against Harper’s gut and she wheezes, swinging her own leg out to bring Blythe down.  

They stumble and fight their way across the rooftop, Blythe trying to goad her each parry and punch that lands, both of them panting for breath. 

“Are you really willing to sacrifice everything for that boy?” Blythe spits out. And it’s – it’s such a lightbulb moment for Harper. Because the answer is so obvious. The answer is yes. The answer is _of course_. 

Blythe finds this weakness and she uses it. She grabs hold of Harper, and then Harper is falling.

 

 

 

 

 

Harper falls from the roof, and it’s a long way down. It’s just like that fall down that well, the sort of fall you know you’re gonna walk away from a different person. She can hear yelling as she plummets; she thinks it’s David, and that’s nice. It’s nice how he scrapes her splayed body off the ground, bundles her up in his arms, like a friend, like someone who cares, and she might cry a little, because falling off a building effing (only, the real word) hurts. Every little thing, every responsibility – it  _hurts_.

 

 

 

 

 

They’re in her bathroom again, perched on the edge of her tub. Her limbs are all now pointing in the right directions and her shoulder’s where it should be and she thinks maybe, just maybe, she’s where she’s supposed to be, too. Maybe that’s why she says it out loud.

“They’re going to keep coming,” she says quietly. “For you. For me.” She pauses, flexes her hand and her bones feel stiff. 

“I’m scared,” she hears herself say.

She glances over and David’s got that unsure look to his face, like comfort or empathy hardly come natural to him and he has to reach for it. “Well, yeah,” he finally says. “Of course you are.” 

She’s on the verge of scowling (thanks a lot, not-quite-buddy), but he pats her awkwardly on the shoulder, like he’s afraid it might pop out again. When he moves to pull his hand away, she grabs him by the wrist, gives him a small taste of that super strength, and listens to the high gasp he sucks in. She holds his hand to her shoulder, the warm weight reassuring.

“Fond” is a good and gentle word for what she thinks she feels for him. It doesn’t spook her, at least. Because she’s become the kind of person who spooks easily, at least when it comes to him. She thinks that’s patently unfair because she’s Harper Price and a girl like Harper Price doesn’t spook. Not when her world gets turned upside down and not when she’s suddenly endowed with super powers and not when she kinda sorta takes it upon herself to protect the one person (the one _boy_ ) she’s always told herself she doesn’t like. Not for any of that or her own blood she quietly cleans up in the bathroom while her parents sleep, blissfully unaware, because even though she might be powered by some kind of glow-in-the-dark plutonium super juice she still gets hurt and she still bleeds, and not a single bit of that spooks her. No, the only thing that gives her the spooks and the heebie-jeebies is the thought that she might like David Stark more than any human being (or any super human being who, if she wanted to, could probably lift eighteen David Starks over her head) has any right to like a non-super human being like David Stark.

“Hey,” he says, all self-deprecating gallows humor. “We’re in this together, right?”

She turns her head quickly to look at him, like he might be the biggest surprise out of all this, and that’s really saying something, and he’s looking at her too, and –

He needs to shave, scratchy blonde stubble grown patchy over his jaw. He has a chipped front tooth, knows there’s a story behind that, surprises herself by finding she’s interested in hearing it. Surprises herself: how up close all these imperfections added up to something worth wanting.

And then, he kisses her. He leans in that much closer, somehow managing to come off as both unsure and certain simultaneously. His mouth against hers is soft and electric and right. It’s a shock, in more ways than one:

1\. That he would kiss her.   
2\. That she wanted him to kiss her.   
3\. That she wanted to kiss him back.

“Is this,” she says, mouth so, so, _so_ close to his, “just because I’m alive?”

“I don’t make a habit of kissing dead girls, Pres.”

He’s about to say something more; she kisses him instead. She likes how that shuts him up. She likes that even if he can see the future she can still make it unpredictable.

 

 

 

 

“You’re gonna need a name,” he tells her. 

They’re perched at the top of the water tower, overlooking the town. 

“Paladin,” he says then.

“Pala-what?” she says.

“The Paladin of Pine Grove.”

“That doesn’t help me.”

“You know, like a knight. Totally devoted to saving the world and stuff. Goodness. And kindness. You know,” he says again. “Like you.”

“Paladin,” she says, and then again, warping the syllables on her tongue. She can’t bite down fast enough on the smile that works her mouth. He catches it, offers her a small smirk of his own. “No one’s gonna know what that means,” she tells him.

His smirk grows into a full-blown grin, all teeth and bright eyes and that knowing mischief that has always made her furious. It does something else to her now.

“I guess you’re just gonna have to teach ‘em, Pres.”

 

 

 


End file.
